Tutu and Franklin:
The Past (continue)
ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes, we, we are being penalized, their definition of who we are, when we ought to be saying this is where they tried to put us--yes--and we've gone through that particular experience. But we survived. We are survivors. We're not victims. We will, we will not allow them to have trampled us underfoot. We, we emerged, despite all of the forces that were ranged against us, and here we are, a people with this incredible legacy in our music, in our, in our faith, in, in our particular kind of preaching, that, that are so--that are tremendous gifts that have emerged out of, out of this furnace of anguish and suffering.
DR. FRANKLIN: Right; right. And one other aspect of that which is so important for us to understand ourselves, and not hate ourselves, is the stereotyping--
ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes.
DR. FRANKLIN: --that, that comes from the generalizations that people have ta--sought to make about our character and our conduct, and our energy, or lack of energy, our will, and so forth. We--the, the, the stereotyping, which has come from the arguments--
ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes.
DR. FRANKLIN: --that have been offered through the decades and centuries, that we are lazy, or we are without--
ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Initiative.
DR. FRANKLIN: --without initiative, without capacity to acquire certain kinds of knowledge, and all the rest of it. And that has been preserved, despite everything that can happen. That, that has been preserved. It's reflected in so many other--so many different ways. Now, I said we bought into that--
ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes; yes.
DR. FRANKLIN: --and the result is that we continue to hate ourselves, and to act to ourselves, and to each other among us, as though we were the perpetrators--of the crime in the first place–
ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes. Absolutely.
DR. FRANKLIN: --which is--which is [inaudible].
ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Now this is, I think, when, perhaps, the attempt in South Africa to have a Truth And Reconciliation Commission may be something that the United States might want to look into, which is that part of that process consisted in letting people tell their story, tell the story of what happened to them.
And since most of them were the very marginalized, the anonymous ones, the ones whom the world didn't think really mattered, who were able to come and be able to tell their story in this forum, set up by a President that they loved. That assisted them in rehabilitating their dignity.
It was painful, obviously, because people were relating things that may have happened 10, 20 years ago. But it was like opening wounds that you thought had healed, but in fact had festered. You opened those wounds and in the telling you were cleansing them, and enabling the nation, as it were, to pour ointment on them.
And I think that sort of just looking at your own country from the outside, but why you will constantly seem to have these eruptions of racist incidents is that, on the whole, you have not dealt with the legacy of here, of this point of no return. But there is an ache sitting in the pit of the tummy of most black Americans.
DR. FRANKLIN: There's no question about that. I, I thi--I hope we'll have a chance to discuss, at greater length, the analogy, or the possible analogy between the South African experience and the experience in the United States.
But I think, at least for the time-being, without getting too far into it, for the time-being, I think there are examples which can be followed, and which we've sought to follow in a humble and modest way. Namely, the, the kind of effort we have made in the last year to get people to--
ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Talk.
DR. FRANKLIN: Talking about the past and so forth. One of the problems is that we've, we've done such a poor job--
ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes.
DR. FRANKLIN: --so far as memory is concerned, that it is difficult for us to summon up the real experiences of slavery.
ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes.
DR. FRANKLIN: That ended, after all, more than 140 years ago.
ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes; yes.
DR. FRANKLIN: We, we have all kinds of humiliating and, uh, terrible experiences since that time, but they are the product--
ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes.
DR. FRANKLIN: --of that basic institution of slavery, that ended in nine--in 1865. So that what you say is very well-taken, and we, we certainly ought to enter into whatever it is that we can do--
ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes.
DR. FRANKLIN: --to eliminate the kind of, of, of--I would call it almost moral rot, that is, the kind of, of--of degradation, the kind of humiliation, the kind of discrimination that has gone on and on, and at times even thrived in, in the post-Emancipation years.
ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes; yes.
DR. FRANKLIN: So we've got, we've got--I would say that our problem, if it's possible, is, is--is more complicated--
ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes.
DR. FRANKLIN: --because,
first, we have just out and out slavery that--
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